Anyway, the president held a press conference at this second summit's conclusion. In between occasionally comprehensible assessments of where the two sides were and why they failed to reach an agreement, Trump said the talks ended with a handshake and that "the relationship was very warm, and when we walked away it was a very friendly walk." That was after he offered that Jong-un "wants to de-nuke, but he wants to just do areas that are less important than the areas that we want." He denied reports the U.S. walked back its demands for full denuclearization.

“It was about the sanctions," you see. "Basically, they wanted the sanctions lifted in their entirety, and we couldn't do that."

And then there was this:

This content is imported from Twitter. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

Here's the video of Trump defending Kim Jong Un on the case of Otto Warmbier, the American student who died last year after being imprisoned in North Korea.

Why? Why does the president take Jong-un "at his word"? What good is the word of the North Korean dictator? And does anyone really believe that a prisoner who's a citizen of a dictatorship's No. 1 foreign adversary gets treatment without input from the leader of the dictatorship? That prisoner, Otto Warmbier, was a college student from Ohio whose family says he was tortured in a North Korean prison. He was released and flown back to the U.S. in 2017, but was in a coma from which he never recovered.

Then again, as the Washington Post's Philip Rucker pointed out, the president also took Russian strongman Vladimir Putin at his word about whether he interfered in the 2016 election—a position that contradicted Trump's own intelligence agencies. The president took Mohammed bin Salman at his word when he said he had nothing to do with the atrocious murder of U.S.-resident journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Again, that directly contradicted U.S. intelligence, which found MBS ordered the assassination. And Trump once again disputed his own intelligence agencies' findings on Thursday, when he Both Sides-d the question of whether North Korea really intends to denuclearize. U.S. intelligence found Kim's regime has no such intention, which has set Trump off attacking them before.

Getty Images

Quite simply, the President of the United States loves authoritarians and dictators. Apparently, at the last summit in Singapore that resulted in the Show Deal, Trump told Jong-un he's a rich kid who turned out well. This, the same Jong-un who ordered the murder of his own uncle with an anti-aircraft gun and of his half-brother with a nerve agent classified as a weapon of mass destruction. The same Jong-un whom the United Nations found has committed "crimes against humanity" including "enslavement, extermination, forced abortion, imprisonment, murder, rape and other forms of sexual violence, and torture." Trump previously seized on these truths to criticize Jong-un on the world stage. Now he says they're BFFs.

Trump is apparently under the impression he can trick Jong-un into making a deal if he butters him up enough, as if Jong-un doesn't have intelligence services of his own or can't get a copy of The New York Times. Perhaps our fearless leader is trying to stuff this into a paradigm with which he's familiar: say, the New York real estate world, where you'd have to glad-hand some schmuck to get a change to zoning laws before you hire a contractor you'll eventually stiff.

MANAN VATSYAYANAGetty Images

This is the big leagues, where his predecessor, President Barack Obama, negotiated a nuclear agreement with Iran without publicly suggesting the leadership there was composed of great guys he'd love to grab a beer with. He did not have to butter up the Ayatollah in public to get a deal that Trump promptly tore up because Obama Did It. Like Obama was right to reach out to a bad actor to avoid a larger conflict, Trump is right to seek diplomacy here. But you don't have to continually erase the millions of victims of the North Korean regime with talk you're "in love" with its "very honorable" leader.

While the outcome of this summit is in no way catastrophic, we're once again reminded that hiring someone with no experience in any relevant field is not a great recruiting strategy when you're looking for a President of the United States. It's best not to compound that by choosing someone who's fundamentally incurious about the world. But the bar right now is avoiding nuclear holocaust, and Trump cleared it once again. Let's celebrate! Just don't Google "India" or "Pakistan."

Jack HolmesPolitics EditorJack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io

This commenting section is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page. You may be able to find more information on their web site.

A Part of Hearst Digital Media
Esquire participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means we may get paid commissions on editorially chosen products purchased through our links to retailer sites.